Today I went to see the movie “God on My Side”. It’s a documentary in which Australian television personality Andrew Denton interviews attendees at the National Religious Broadcasters' Convention in Texas. As he points out, these are the fundamentalists who were so influential in voting George Bush into the White House, and who believe that he and they are pursuing God’s agenda on earth.
What struck me about most of these people is their lack of faith.
Jesus said of the last days : “You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” Matthew 24:6-8.
This suggests that we should have faith that what needs to happen will happen and that we are not to try to interfere or try to control it. And yet these people are concerned about things like supporting George Bush and supporting Israel, because they seem to believe that God needs them to do so. Surely what Jesus was saying is that what will happen will happen and what we do is of no importance. He was suggesting we have faith and not allow fear to determine our behaviour.
It seems to me that religious fundamentalism is founded on fear of personal mortality. We are all going to die. There is no getting around that. And even before death, our ego is a fragile thing which can easily break down. But it is precisely at such times that we often have a glimpse of heaven.
I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell as places we may go when we die. But heaven and hell are states of mind we can experience while we are alive.
Heaven is those times when we lose all sense of ourselves, when we are so enraptured by beauty or so involved in some fascinating activity that we forget all of our problems and our attempts to prove our worth.
Hell is when we are suffering so much, either through physical pain or through depression, that we are aware of nothing but ourselves.
The door to heaven is open to us at any time we are willing to accept that we are of absolutely no importance. The bars of our own hell - the “mind-forged manacles” as Blake put it - are our attempts to justify ourselves or prove our self-worth. Accept that none of this matters and we can see that heaven is all around us. It is there in a child’s smile, in the rain that waters the earth, even in the maggots that rise in new life from dead meat. All around us is evidence that life and love are eternal and unbroken by strife and suffering.
As Jesus said : “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life.” Matthew 4:25-27
But amongst these fundamentalists we find not just worry about their own lives but, even more so, worry about how others live their lives. They are worried about things like homosexuality and abortion. If Jesus said they were not to trouble themselves about wars and famines, what makes them think that Jesus wanted them to interfere in the affairs of homosexuals or women seeking abortions?
Now my view of God may be different from theirs. I believe that God is love - the force which is most deeply repressed in each of us, buried beneath : the worries about what kind of clothes to wear; the anger at injustices done to us; our sexual desires; and our religious and political beliefs. Beneath all these things which separate us, is something which would unite us if we let it - the spirit of love, the Christ-nature which is our true self.
I think this is why Jesus told us not to trouble ourselves about wars. The Christ-nature can only rise to the surface if all that is repressed on top of it comes out in some way. It would be much easier for us if we could all express our repressed aggression in some other form than war, but this would require faith that war was unnecessary, that God’s will would be manifested if we allowed ourselves to be untroubled by things like terrorism. That’s a pretty hard sell. Most people don’t have that much faith. So, for the time being, war may be the only way for some people to release the aggression which keeps their Christ-nature repressed. And thus it is part of the birth pains.
When it comes to abortion, I think the decision is one for the woman who is carrying the child, and should ideally be made without pressure from either quarter. If God is love, I can’t see that a woman deciding to have her unborn child killed is against God. One vessel of love is as good as another and there are more problems from having too many bodies in the world than not enough. It is not until after we are born that we develop a sense of ourselves as individuals, before that we are just a potential individual, just as the spermatozoa and eggs which don’t ever develop into a foetus are potential individuals.
If God is love, then what is wrong with homosexuality? “Sex is not love,” you may say, and it is true that sex can be an expression of emotions other than love. But often it is an expression of love - a giving and receiving of physical comfort and pleasure - which is something which, when uncontaminated by an unjustified sense of shame - is healing. Now sexual relationships can be shallow, but if love is what is most deeply repressed in us, how is its expression served by sexual repression? The only thing which can make free sexual expression lead to repression is if it is accompanied by the unjustified sense of shame that fundamentalists are trying to engender.
In the film, when the subject of homosexuality is raised, there is much talk of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. Of course this is a story from the Old Testament. The Old Testament God is not love, but a boogieman conjured up to scare people into obeying the laws of society. Society has always been based on repression. Repression of : interpersonal - as opposed to intertribal or international - aggression ; selfishness ; sexuality ; individuality ; and, beneath all of these, the universal love of our Christ-nature. All of these repressed forces threaten the smooth operation of civilisation. We can’t work together if we fight too much. The structure of society could not be maintained if we simply stole anything we wanted. And who would work at a boring job if, instead, they could laze around under the trees, eating, drinking and fucking. And if we all lived like Christ lived, it would also bring down society, as he contributed little to the maintenance of the social system of his time. He was the proto-typical dropout. Religion - from religare, meaning “to bind” - was invented to maintain social order. (What Jesus preached was not a religion. It was only perverted into one after he died.)
Clearly in Sodom and Gomorra the social order broke down as repression lost its hold. These societies became decadent. But think what the term “decadence” means. It comes from the same root as the word “decay”. A decadent society is a society in decay. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Decay is a natural part of the circle of life. All living things, when they are no longer working properly, die and decay. This is the process by which they turn into other things which work better. Why should this not be the case with societies?
Our society today has become one which endangers our continued existence by the pressures that it puts on the world’s ecosystem. And it is a society founded on an economic system for which we slave even though it fails to deliver us any real kind of happiness. Isn’t this a form of civilisation which deserves to die, and is not the decadence which eats away at it a healthy thing? If we let out what we have been repressing, won’t we find - beneath it all - our Christ-nature?
Fundamentalists, of course, don’t see it this way. But, then, fundamentalists have no faith.
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